Organisation Citizenship: A Great Employee Engagement Tool

Organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is a term that’s used to describe all the positive and constructive employee actions and behaviours that aren’t part of their formal job description. It captures all that employees do voluntarily and willingly to support their co-workers and that which benefits the organisation as a whole. OCB is not part of an employee’s contractual tasks and something that’s required from them on the job.

Organisational citizenship behaviour was first defined by Dennis Organ (Professor of Management at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a member of the Academy of Management and the American Psychological Society) in 1988 as, “individual behaviour that is discretionary, not explicitly recognised by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organisation.”